


All That We See or Seem

by Heptapora



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 21:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7950268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heptapora/pseuds/Heptapora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, Percy gets to sleep in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That We See or Seem

He’d missed breakfast. 

That wasn't at all surprising; There were no true windows in Scanlan’s mansion, but by the time he abandoned his project he could _feel_ the approaching dawn dragging at his bones. Even so, ‘project’ was a strong word. Realistically, he might call it a heap of uniquely-shaped garbage. What could go wrong did, and what could break, broke. Frustratingly, he’d found himself wishing more than once for Keyleth at his elbow, with her nimble little fingers, able to slide into the spaces his couldn’t, or a spare hand to hold the pieces while he tried, or just- _Her_ , to _be there_ , and it was a queer and aggravating thing to realize that he honestly believed the whole endeavor might have gone better if he’d only had her company. It wasn’t as if it had been too late for her when he started, but she had been… Occupied with Vax’ildan. Too occupied for him to intrude, and he’d be damned if it weren’t awfully, horrifically, unexpectedly-  
  
…Inconvenient of the two of them, to be so wrapped up in each other.  
  
And so, finally, a few choice pieces had gone into the fire, and he, with all his frustrations, had tumbled into his bed, simmering there until sleep took him. It was a fitful sleep, mercifully dreamless but almost certainly only because he never slept deeply enough for dreams to come. Ultimately it was the thrashing of his own body that woke him, a leg halfway through kicking free of a tangle of blankets. He sat upright ( _fuzzy-headed_ ), and stood ( _oh, dizzy_ ), dressing with all the grace and efficiency of a sleepwalker. His hands were clumsy, eyes dry, and the buttonholes of his shirt very nearly vexed him into surrender. He bested them in the end, allowed himself a moment to splash cool water into his face and buff the lenses of his glasses with the tail of his shirt. It helped- Some.  
  
And then he descended the stairs (Huge, curving- Impressive, but he always wondered how much Scanlan suffered climbing them, with his short legs), found the dining room, and realized that he’d missed breakfast. There were dishes still scattered across the table, and the heavy, stale scent of grease and flame hung in the air. He’d missed the rest of Vox Machina, too- The seats were empty, and the mansion was, at least where he stood, utterly silent. But that wasn’t unusual; If anything, this was the most normal thing that had happened to him in a good, long while. His sleep schedule had often put him out of sync with the lot of them back at the Keep, where they’d had the luxury of sleeping when they pleased. It seemed there was no rush this morning, even here, or else someone surely would have come to retrieve him, and he'd fallen quite easily back into old habits. As for the quiet... They might be anywhere in the far-flung corners of the mansion at this point; He had the strong suspicion that Scanlan dreamed up new rooms on a whim, and they could have wandered miles’ worth of hallways away by now.  
  
That was fine. Absolutely fine. Good, even, that they’d let him rest.  
  
There were none of Scanlan’s spectral servants there either, and while he would be pressed to make a call on the normalcy of that, he was perfectly content to let them be. After some of the uses he’d seen them put to- And some of Scanlan’s leading remarks, the sincerity of which he couldn’t even begin to fathom- he wasn’t about to start raising questions. Anyway, he could work a stove. Even an unlikely arcane stove, probably; There was nothing in a kitchen that was more complex than the contents of his workshop.  
  
After a cursory once-over to reassure himself that, yes, the kitchen was workable by human hands, equipped with sensible stoves, a pantry, and even a cold chest, he set to rummaging. The quality of the food was abysmal (Hunks of chicken- Why was it still hunks of chicken? Scanlan was a peculiar sort of creature but there were enough of them staying here that he would have thought _someone_ would have remedied it by now) but he’d expected as much, and the stove lit up with a ghostly flame beneath his pan. It was utterly soundless- When he stood still, the silence was as whole and persistent as it had been when he’d walked in, bearing down on him like a corporeal thing.  
  
Strange, then, that he hadn’t heard Vex’ahlia approach. She was quiet, but the room was quieter, and he would have thought that might have betrayed her but instead the oppressive, dead air swallowed up the sound of her footfalls entirely. Maybe he was distracted, maybe his drowsy mind was wandering farther than he’d realized- Regardless, the suddenness of the voice at his ear, no matter how gentle, was absolutely uncanny. He startled, his whole body jerking, and his fingers where they lay loose on the handle of the skillet jolted forward, pressing into the hot body of the pan. He gasped and spun, injured hand held aloft, his heart racing- And met Vex’s eyes, her face concerned, her own hand raised to touch. The sight was so blessedly familiar, so normal, that his panic began to fade immediately. Just Vex. Just Vex, and he needed more sleep. That was all.  
  
“I said, ‘you’re finally up’?” she repeated, patiently, and the hand that had been hovering at the height of his shoulder fell a bit as she noticed his fingers, already an angry red. Hers curled cool around his wrist, pulling at it until she could get a better look, and she hummed remorsefully. “Oh, Darling. Your hand. I’m sorry.” Behind him, he was aware, suddenly, of the sound of popping grease.  
  
“It’s no matter, I wasn’t.. Paying a whole lot of attention, I suppose,” he said, dismissive. His gaze slid past her- He was thinking about the chicken, and Trinket, readying himself to run interference between the hot skillet and any inquisitive bear snouts. But there was no hulking bear at her heels. He spared a passing thought for the strangeness of it, of Vex wandering around without her shadow. He wasn’t naive enough to think the animal had been (sensibly) barred from the kitchen; But perhaps he was with Grog, or in the custody of her twin.  
  
And anyway, the sight of her was so overwhelmingly welcome that he couldn’t care too much about anything else. It was safer now, in her company, to admit that the solitude had felt… Strange. Unwelcome. He’d been awake and rambling around for no more than twenty minutes but it felt, impossibly, like hours, and he had been hedging perilously close to something like a bitter, nervous loneliness. It seemed foolish now- As if any of them ever had cause to feel lonely. They spent so much time so near to each other that he could probably identify each of them by the sound of their breathing. Still, he was relieved. Maybe that closeness had finally spoiled him. Maybe he’d forgotten, after all this time, how to be alone.  
  
“I have to admit, I am glad to see you,” he confessed, and his fingers were starting to smart now as the burn set in, but still he felt himself smiling. “I was starting to think… That…”  
  
And that was where he stopped. When he’d fallen in with Vox Machina he’d gotten used to being touched, quickly and out of sheer necessity. He would say Keyleth needed practice determining when touch was welcome if he thought she realized she needed to try at all, and at this point he’d need two hands to count off the number of times Vax had kissed him on or around his face. He’d thought nothing of it when Vex had grasped his wrist. But what he felt now was something entirely different; She’d lowered her head, and that was the kiss of her breath on his skin, ticklishly light. It puzzled him into silence, and a split second later he forgot what he’d been saying entirely as- Deliberately, without a word- she took a finger into her mouth.  
  
He’d never dreamt she might be so _soft_ \- Her lips moving down towards his knuckle were absolutely decadent, and they were still nothing compared to her tongue sliding against the pad of his finger, silken and _curling_ _around_ , just so. The heat should have been uncomfortable against the burn, probably, but there was no pain, just the electric awareness of her mouth, her lips and her tongue and the impossible intimacy of what she was doing. A bolt of heat started at the point of contact and shot straight to the pit of his stomach, pooling there.  
  
He might have felt bad- Might have thought he was making far, far too much of something that could just as easily have been a reflex, or a friendly favor, popping a burnt finger into her mouth to cool it- if she didn’t… Hold it there. And if, when she peered up at him from under her lashes, her eyes weren’t quite so- So-  
  
He didn’t have words for her expression. He’d seen her make all sorts of faces, but.. He’d never seen her look at anything- At anyone- quite like _this_. He knew what her temper looked like, and her fear, and her longing, all different flavors of her intensity, but this was absolutely.. Ravenous. Her pupils were blown wide and dark, irises little more than thin threads of gleaming silver, and she scarcely blinked. She was watching him watch her, measuring his reaction, and he was holding his breath, paralyzed by the fear of doing something wrong, of spoiling this. His tongue ran along his lips, a nervous flicker; Finally, he leaned in, bowing his head towards her, and his other hand came up to cup her cheek. She smiled, lips curving around his finger, and the sight, the overwhelming _want_ that rushed through him, made his head spin.  
  
His head was spinning, and he was..Seeing spots, suddenly, seeing dark swimming at the corner of her mouth, and maybe he was more tired than he thought. Impatiently, he tried to blink the shadows away, but they refused to clear. More than that, now they were…growing, and there was no mistaking this for a trick of his eyes any longer; Inky blackness was welling up at the corner of Vex’Ahlia’s lovely mouth, pushed from behind her lips, and she, for her part, didn’t seem to notice. She was still smiling, if a little bit confused, watching him like she couldn’t understand why his face had fallen even as the dark froth began to rise from the opposite corner of her mouth, as well. He felt nothing on his finger, nothing but the heat of her tongue; Not even as the blackness spilled over, running over her lips, running down her chin.  
  
That, she noticed.  
  
Her brow creased, first, as if she’d felt something that puzzled her; She pushed softly against his wrist and, like pulling the cork from a bottle, where his hand drew away more darkness spilled out of her. It dribbled from her mouth, and where it fell from her chin it wasn’t liquid any more, not really. Like ink dropped into water, it spun lazily in the air, hovering in ribbons black as night. She raised her hand, cupped her palm under it, and it swirled around her fingers.  
  
Smoke, he realized. It was heavy, heavy smoke.  
  
When the dark began to gather in her nostrils, pooling there until there was too much and it began to spill over, the puzzlement on her face turned to horror.  
  
It was getting harder to see her now; She was quickly vanishing behind a dark shroud, but he could tell when she began to wretch. Her efforts brought up more of the darkness, more of the hideous smoke; Thick mouthfuls of it that sunk towards the floor, dark spurts from her nostrils, but it didn’t do any good, it didn’t _end_ \- She was doubled over now, choking, and in his terror he reached for her with both hands, desperate to help although he had no idea what he could do--  
  
He’d barely touched her when she reeled back, raising her face to him (Beads of black in the corners of her eyes, rising up like dark, viscous tears) and he realized why an instant later- His hands, extended towards her, were wreathed in sooty black smoke, thicker even than the filth streaming from her mouth. He couldn’t imagine how he hadn’t noticed before, couldn’t imagine how he hadn’t realized he would poison her-- How could he have let her touch him? Why didn’t he stop her..?  
  
He watched, helpless, as Vex’ahlia clutched her throat, watched as she fell to her knees. He couldn’t help; He couldn’t even put his hands on her, not without making it worse. He never should have touched her. He never should have..  
  
  
Percival woke with the thrashing of his own body, leg halfway through kicking off a tangle of blankets.  
  
He was drenched in sweat, this time, and his heart beat against the hollow inside of his chest, so hard he thought it might break free. His throat was raw, as if he’d screamed- Maybe he had- and for an instant he was paralyzed, gulping in scorching mouthfuls of air. Then he remembered himself, remembered the smoke, and he was clawing his way free of the last of the sheets, lifting his hands-  
  
Black. Swimming in darkness, black as the soot in his forge, and he groaned, a broken, wounded sound. One hand remained aloft, pinned under his gaze; The other he flung out, groping desperately for the mage light beside his bed. His fingers fumbled, desperate and numb; Finally he found it, and the flare of white light was blinding. He couldn’t help but shut his eyes against it. And when he opened them again…  
  
He saw his hand. Just his hand, a little blurry without his glasses, fair skin peppered with scars, bony knuckles and blunt nails. No smoke. No darkness- It had just been the low light of his room, then. Just a dream.  
  
He inspected the other hand, anyway- Just to be sure- and lay awake in the light until his heartbeat slowed. The sheets, when he investigated them with trembling fingers, were soaked through, clammy with his sweat; Clumsily, he tore them from the bed and threw them to the floor. His nightshirt joined them a moment later, and when he could breathe again, he reached over, and he turned out the light.  
  
It was only a dream. Only…a dream. He could be sensible about a nightmare. He could, and he would be.  
  
Still, he lay awake, staring up towards the high ceiling, shrouded somewhere in darkness high above his head. Black, black, black. Sensibly, he shut his eyes, well aware that he needed to rest- But he opened them again an instant later. The space behind his eyelids was perilous; Surrendering to the darkness felt too much like laying himself willingly into the jaws of some great beast.  
  
It was a dream. But he couldn’t dispel the thought that he’d had dreams before. He’d had dreams of smoke before.  
  
The knock at his door came bright and early. (Of course there was no time to sleep in; There hadn’t been time to sleep in for months, and there might never be again. Stupid, stupid.) It was just as well- He was already awake. He _had been_ awake, for miserable hours- At least now he could stop chasing sleep that would never come. Keyleth’s voice came a beat later, a gentle, “Percy? We have to go now,” and he called back a hoarse response, swinging heavy legs over the side of his bed. Outside the nonsensical hellscape of his dreams, his shirt went on easy; The buttons made sense, even to his tired hands. And in the hall, there was noise; The bass rumble of Grog’s complaints, the clear, high note of Pike’s reply. He even imagined that he heard the heavy thud of bear paws, and that meant Vex.  
  
He froze where he stood, hand on the doorknob, and waited until the sounds faded away. Only when he was sure the hallway was empty did Percy dare to step out into the open, exhausted and miserable and surer than he’d ever been that there were things in the world that he could never, ever have.

**Author's Note:**

> “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” 
> 
> I'm a little bit sorry.


End file.
